Fall Out Boy lead singer Stump is no 'frontman type'

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Fall Out Boy

No one paid Patrick Stump much mind during an evening shopping excursion at New York City's vintage vinyl emporium Academy Records recently. Flipping through racks of albums swiftly, like the record shop employee he once was, he worked his way methodically through the store – blues, then jazz, then world, then rock – all the while bopping his head to the soul obscurity Leo's Sunshipp, piped in over the store's speaker system: just another record nerd, sating his jones.

Stump, 24, prefers it this way. That he is the lead singer of the multiplatinum rock band Fall Out Boy has done little to convince him that attention is something to warm to. Instead, Stump has quite willingly ceded the spotlight, if it was ever on him, to the band's bass player, Pete Wentz, 29, the rambunctious attention vacuum known for marrying the singer Ashlee Simpson, hosting his own show on MTV and oversharing on the Internet, including some unfortunate photos of his nether regions that surfaced in 2006.

This week Fall Out Boy, which also includes the guitarist Joe Trohman and the drummer Andy Hurley, will release “Folie a Deux,” its fifth album and third on a major label, Island Def Jam. It's the band's most concise, restrained album to date, taking its main cues from slick 1980s arena rock, but what's notable is Stump's growth and versatility, as both a vocalist and a songwriter. The album comes while Stump is also in increasing demand as a producer for other artists and Wentz is reconsidering his public image. If there were a time for Stump to step up and demand notice, this would be it. But if it's OK, he'd rather not, thanks.

“I never really felt like the frontman type,” Stump, who is perhaps the least visible lead singer of any popular band. When he speaks, he worries the shock of hair that hangs down in front of his left ear, running his fingers over it repeatedly. “I got really lucky in Pete. He's such a personality that I don't have to be a character, really. It's selfish that I let him get thrust into that, but it was awesome for me.”

Stump has fronted Fall Out Boy, which performs tomorrow night at Mira Mesa's Epicentre, since its inception in 2001 in the Chicago-area punk scene, and he has been the primary architect of the group's sound, which in short order has evolved from spiky emo to radio-friendly pop-punk. Wentz, who writes the words, is responsible for the group's hyperliterate emotional heft, but it is Stump who takes it from there, chiseling Wentz's lyrics – “Beat poetry” is how Stump describes the raw text; “Ornette Coleman with words” – into traditional song structures, then writing the melodies, hooks and arrangements for the other band members to play. And though it's Wentz's feelings coming out of his mouth, it's Stump who is the voice of the band.

This circumstance is, naturally, an accident. To this day, Stump is modest about his talent.

“I sing because Pete wanted me to,” he said. “I sing because Pete saw in me a singer.” When Stump auditioned for Fall Out Boy, it was to be the drummer. “I don't remember ever singing for anybody until I was in a band,” he said. “It was something you did very privately.”

In recent years, Stump has begun working outside Fall Out Boy, producing both in the hip-hop sense, making beats for Lupe Fiasco and Tyga, and in the rock sense, helping shape songs by Gym Class Heroes, Cobra Starship and the Hush Sound. (In his downtime, he also wrote and directed a short film.)

“Patrick's strongest skill as a producer is having a great sense of melody, where the focus on certain lyrics should be,” said Greta Salpeter of the Hush Sound. “He doesn't really engineer anything. It doesn't matter if you know how to set up a microphone. The only thing that matters to him is that you have a great song.”

No one seems more pleased with, or relieved by, Stump's evolution than Wentz.

“Patrick, I think, is a musical genius. He has a natural grasp of music theory,” Wentz said. “But who I have been has infringed upon that. I feel as though I've made it harder for people to understand that.”

When speaking of his role in the band, Wentz is given to the grand metaphor. His courting of attention, or infamy, was, he said, “the booster rocket on the shuttle – it needs to drop off so the rocket goes where it can go.”

And so, whether Stump is prepared to step forward, Wentz is in retreat. The lyrics on “Folie a Deux” are the least explicitly personal Wentz has yet written, he said, coming not coincidentally at the time of his highest tabloid value. In May, Wentz married Simpson, and last month, the couple had their first child, a son, Bronx Mowgli. This month, Wentz is also staging his first art show, of works done with McCoy, at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles.

But as Wentz tries to restore privacy to his life and Stump continues to shun the limelight, will the resulting void leave Fall Out Boy without a center of gravity? Wentz insists that Stump has been that all along: “I think people will remember the immense ideas that Patrick had. He's definitely a lottery ticket.”

If still a reluctant one. A couple of weeks after shopping at Academy Records, Stump was in New York again, drafted into star duty for the finale of the MTV show “TRL,” which fell a few days before Simpson gave birth. Diddy and Taylor Swift were there. Snoop Dogg and Kid Rock, too. And Stump, shrugging off his invisibility cloak, did what he could to savor the moment.

“He was telling me about it,” said Salpeter, who spoke with him shortly thereafter, “and he said, “Oh, man, I had to go be the face and do the celebrity thing. It was terrible!' ”